I said I thought he had not meant her to be a romantic character.
"No more she is," he explained. "The romance is all from outside. She looks romantic, but she isn't. She is like a person who has been bewitched. She always thinks she is going to behave like an ordinary person, but she can't. She has no dreams. She would like to marry, to have a home, to be comfortable and free, but something prevents it. When the young man proposes to her she feels she can never marry him. As soon as he is gone, she regrets having done this, and imagines that if he came back she would love him."
"And when he does come back, does she love him?" I asked.
"She thinks she does, but that is only because he has forgotten her. If he hadn't forgotten her, and had asked her to marry him, she would have said 'No' a second time. Then when the other person who is in love with her wants to marry her, she thinks she is in love with him; she thinks he is the Fairy Prince; but as soon as they are engaged, he feels that his love has gone. It has faded from the want of something in her which he discovers at the very first kiss; he breaks off the engagement, and she is grateful at being set free, and glad to go back to her forest."
I asked if she is unhappy when it is over.
He said, "Yes, she is unhappy, but she accepts it. She is not broken-hearted because she never loved him. She realizes that she can't love and will never love, and accepts the situation."
I said that I saw no mysterious lining in the story as told that way.
He said there was none; but the lining would come in the manner the story was told. He would try and give the reader the impression that she had come into touch with the fairy world by accident and that the adventure had left a mark that nothing could alter.
She had no business to have adventures in fairy land.
She had strayed into that world by mistake. She was not native to it, although she looked as if she were.